A Eulogy for Copy
Copy, the excellent and highly useful service that provided easy-to-use cloud file syncing, sharing and data backup, will discontinue their service on May 1 of this year. I was both shocked and saddened when I saw the news on my Mac today.
Barracuda, (the owners of Copy), were the underdogs in the cloud-storage space arena. In my view, they gave their competitors a pretty darn good run for the money. From the slick and responsive web user interface, to the polished iOS app, Copy was a stellar service from top to bottom. Copy worked beautifully across multiple platforms. Unlike Dropbox, Copy boasted a whopping (and previously unheard of) 15GB of free cloud storage for new users. If you referred someone else to the service, the generous folks at Copy would give both parties an additional 5GB of storage. With referrals, I earned a whopping total of 60GB of free cloud storage space. I put the space to good use – keeping my commonly used design assets (fonts, textures, brushes and the like) synced across all three of my Macs.
But all good things come to an end.
And so it is with Copy. Barracuda cites a shift in their business for their discontinuation of the service.
With Copy closing down in a few months, I’ve already transferred all my files and folders onto a local hard drive. You will lose your files after May 1st. At present, I’m pondering other cloud file storage alternatives – which now comes down to Google Drive and OneDrive. (I already use Dropbox.) The other alternative is to set up a private cloud via Transporter, but the mixed reviews are holding me back.
As I look into other options, one thing’s for sure: I’m going to miss Copy.
-Krishna
Kyle
February 1, 2016 at 8:37 pmWow, I’ve never heard of Copy before. I wish someone had referred me! There is another option, you might consider, though. You could get yourself a VPS and run your own instance of ownCloud.
Krishna
February 1, 2016 at 9:28 pmInteresting. I’ll have to give ownCloud a look.
Jake Eskel
February 3, 2016 at 1:30 amI liked ownCloud, and I’ve understood good things about Syncthing. One is just file sync, but ownCloud is a full Dropbox replacement.
Krishna
February 3, 2016 at 5:46 amThanks, Jake. I’ll have to check them out. ownCloud sounds like just what I need.
Mike Wills
February 1, 2016 at 10:06 pmI would recommend OneDrive, but they have one HUGE isse. No matter your bandwidth, it like to take up every once of to upload your files. Pratically bringing any network connection to it’s knees.
Krishna
February 1, 2016 at 10:28 pmGood to know, Mike. Bandwidth hogging would be an issue for me.
Andreas
February 4, 2016 at 7:16 amKrishna, have you ever considered of buying i NAS like Synology. I use this gem as my own prvate cloud. There are lots of apps available for syncing files, photos, etc.
andreas
Krishna
February 4, 2016 at 8:28 pmI’ll take a look, Andreas. Thanks for the heads-up!
Paul
February 4, 2016 at 8:14 amWhat’s wromg with good old iCloud? Cheap and it “just works.”
Krishna
February 4, 2016 at 8:27 pmI use iCloud for limited synching of Numbers, Pages, and Keynote files only. I’m a bit reluctant to try it for larger number of files.